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Pierce’s Road From Inglewood Could Hit Its Summit Nearby

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — At 5:30 in the morning, Paul Pierce would peel himself out of bed, rub the sleep from his eyes, and hop in his beat-up, brown, two-door Datsun 210 hatchback. He would head over to Inglewood High, often stopping to pick up a couple of friends — one of whom would be unlucky enough to have to crouch down in the hatch. When they arrived at school, they were met by Scott Collins, a policeman and assistant basketball coach at the school.

Once inside, they would often play a game called Out, in which two players would go 1-on-1, and whoever gave up a basket was out — replaced by a player from the sidelines. After the boys had pushed themselves around the court for an hour, Collins would take them to a pancake restaurant down the street, or treat them to “a cop’s breakfast,” as he called it — coffee and donuts.

When the get-together became routine, they gave it a name: the Morning Session.

The Boston Celtics arrived in Los Angeles on Monday carrying a 2-0 lead in the N.B.A. finals, thanks, in large part, to Pierce’s inspiring return from a knee injury in Game 1 and his late free throws that held off a Lakers charge in Game 2. If the Celtics win two of the next three games at Staples Center, they will clinch their first N.B.A. championship since 1986.

For Pierce, such an end would not be far from the beginning.

It was here, growing up in the shadow of the 105 Freeway, that Pierce’s journey from pudgy middle school kid to N.B.A. star began in earnest. Pierce moved with his mother, Lorraine, from Oakland after the sixth grade. His half brothers, Jamal Hosey, who played college basketball at Wyoming, and Steve Hosey, a first-round draft pick of the Cleveland Indians who played briefly with the San Francisco Giants, were out of the house. A basketball became Pierce’s constant companion.

Over the years, Pierce wore out the net, bent the rim and battered the backboard on the hoop in his driveway on Christopher Avenue. He played at the Y.M.C.A., on the blacktop courts near the Forum, and at the Rogers Park Community Center, where he was often kicked out when the gym closed at 10 p.m. But it was through the ritual of the Morning Session that Pierce began to realize that basketball was not just a game to be played, but a craft to be worked at.

“When you look at it, it was kind of nasty because you went to class all sweaty at the time,” Pierce told reporters in Boston on Saturday. “But, hey, that’s what you had to do back then to get to this point.

“It helped me get a work ethic and it helped me sacrifice. Who wants to wake up at 5:30 to go to the gym? I know nowadays I don’t. But when you’re a kid who had dreams and tried to develop a work ethic, those were the things that you wanted to do. Any chance you got you wanted to get in, and that’s pretty much where it all started.”

Photo

Paul Pierce, center, with his Inglewood High basketball team, which he led to a California section championship as a junior.

When Collins unlocked the gym, he didn’t expect to be opening the door for any future N.B.A. players. He was simply looking for an entrance into their lives.

Collins had coached in the Police Activities League, a youth program where he had gotten to know Pierce as a seventh grader. When he became an assistant coach at Inglewood High, Collins noticed that only 2 of the 15 players on the team had fathers at home.

“A lot of the kids I’ve dealt with had no male role model, nobody to look up to in order to see how to be a man,” said Collins, now an Inglewood detective. “If kids respect us on the playground, they’ll respect us on the street. At first, they’re a little apprehensive — I’m a cop. Once you get in there, they get to trust you.”

Inglewood is often in headlines for poverty, crime and corruption. In 1995, when Pierce was a senior in high school, Tupac Shakur sang with Dr. Dre on “California Love” about the city: “Inglewood, Inglewood, always up to no good.” For Pierce and his friends, that song resonated because a year earlier a friend named Howard Johnson was shot and killed.

“It’s a cliché in Inglewood: you either bang or ball,” said Carlo Calhoun, a high school teammate of Pierce. “As a basketball player you might be able to walk down a street that you might not be able to walk down otherwise. It’s a different level of respect.”

When Pierce was stabbed 11 times in the face, neck and back in September 2000, it was not in Inglewood, but in a Boston nightclub.

While Inglewood has a long history of producing basketball players — including the current N.B.A. coaches Byron Scott and Reggie Theus — what really gave basketball its cachet in the community was the Lakers, who played just down the street at the Forum.

Photo

The Celtics Paul Pierce, above, in his 1995 Inglewood High yearbook photo.

Norm Nixon and Michael Cooper worked out at the Rogers Park gym, and Pierce caught glimpses of Magic Johnson driving past the school along Manchester Boulevard on the way to the Forum. Over the years, the Lakers used the city’s high school gyms for practice.

For nearly 35 years, the Lakers were at the heart of the community.

From a quick survey of students, and judging from the amount of Lakers gear worn around campus, Pierce’s return has not spawned any love of the Celtics. The school’s coach, Patrick Roy, is not only one of Pierce’s staunchest supporters, but also one of his only ones.

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Not that he saw this day coming. Roy remembered “a kid who was 5-8, fat and pudgy but had some skills.” Not enough, though, to promote Pierce to the varsity at the start of his sophomore year. Pierce stayed with the J.V. until the holiday season, when several players left on vacation.

Roy put Pierce into a game, and he rallied Inglewood to a win.

“I thought, Wow, this guy did something miraculous,” Roy said. “The next game he was even better. I realized pretty quickly I’d made a mistake.”

By the end of his junior season, he had grown to 6 feet 6 inches, worked off his baby fat and led Inglewood to a section championship. By the end of his senior season, he had earned a scholarship to Kansas.

Pierce says he has forgiven Roy, but he hasn’t forgotten.

After a game in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, Roy waited for Pierce outside the locker rooms where families and friends gather for both teams. With a good crowd around, Pierce asked for everybody’s attention.

Pierce's high school coach, Patrick Roy, did not think Pierce was ready for the varsity as a sophomore.Credit
Alexander Gallardo/The Los Angeles Times

That sense of humor might have been appreciated in some halls, but for most of his 10-year career, Pierce has had to answer questions about his maturity. He was criticized by Coach George Karl after the United States crashed to sixth in the 2002 world championships. He was once ejected from the closing seconds of a tight playoff game and butted heads with Coach Doc Rivers.

A little over a year ago, he told The Boston Globe, “I’m the classic case of a great player on a bad team, and it stinks.”

This season, he has begun to be viewed in a different light. Boston acquired Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, and they have coalesced around Pierce. When Pierce scored 41 points in a Game 7 win over Cleveland, outdueling LeBron James, his name began to be tossed around with other Celtics greats.

The makeover, though, has not been without a blemish.

Late in a playoff loss to Atlanta, he responded to taunting by the Hawks rookie Al Horford by walking toward the Atlanta bench and making a hand gesture, forming a circle with his thumb and index finger, and pointing with the other three fingers. The league, interpreting it as a gang sign, fined Pierce $25,000.

“Everybody knows that’s a Blood sign,” said D. J. Simpson, a sophomore at Inglewood High, drawing a nod of agreement from several others on the playground. “He came from Inglewood. If he went to Washington High, he’d have thrown up a C,” for Crips. “He was just telling Al Horford, you’re messing with the wrong” guy.

Collins, the policeman, said that Pierce was not connected with a gang. He called it an oh-no moment.

“He lost his composure and he threw up a sign without realizing what it can represent,” Collins said. “You have to think about your actions and that people can take that the wrong way. But is that what he’s about? No. The bottom line is he isn’t affiliated with any of that.”

Arrick Turner, the recreation supervisor at Rogers Park, has also known Pierce since he was in seventh grade. He talks of Pierce’s largess, noting that Pierce and Baron Davis have taken over Magic Johnson’s Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, a celebrity all-star game that benefits underprivileged youths. He also has put on a summer clinic at Inglewood High in which he is an active participant and has brought Nike back to Rogers Park to film commercials.

“There’s an etiquette of street life,” Turner said. “How do you distance yourself from the neighborhood you grew up in? The answer is you don’t. Everybody can be true to their roots by being themselves. I can grow up on the same street as you for 15 years, but that doesn’t mean I’m going in the same direction.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pierce’s Road From Inglewood Could Hit Its Summit Nearby. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe